Thursday 21st February

Dad and I left for France this morning, via the Channel Tunnel at 8.00am. Not to Rouen, but to Rambouillet (South-West of Paris) to spend a night with some friends. It was all going well until we got on the wrong road at Calais and ended up heading to Belgium instead of towards Paris! And instead of turning back and starting again we decided to follow the smaller roads, in the direction we thought was right. One thing I noticed straight away was the lack of signposts, nothing that mentioned a big town or wether you we heading north or south. So we navigated by what we thought was right and finally saw a sign for Lille, which or though is not exactly the right direction to go in we knew that we could go South from there to Paris. It did mean that we saw a lot of French towns along the way. On the way to Lille we found a sign for Amiens, which is the way we were supposed to go in the first place. At least now we had some signs to follow. By now it was about 3.30pm Everything was going fine, and we even managed to stop to buy a baguette to eat in the car, untill we reached the edge of Paris, where even though we had directions to follow we got completely lost and ended up heading North again to the town of St Gemain (which is very pretty by the way). We soon realised that we were going the wrong way and backtracked. Our friends had told us to follow signs to Versaille and we manged to find a sign for Versaille eventually. However we were meant to turn off on the the A12 before Versaille, but we ended up in the town itself. We couldn’t find the A12 anywhere. By now it was about 8.00pm and we still had about and hours journey to go so Dad eventally stopped to ask directions. A good job too. Where we had got confused is that before the A12, there is a tiny bit of A13 to go on! So after a very long day we finally arrived in Rambouillet at 9ish, only 4 hours late! I was so tired and hungry. Luckily we had a lovely meal and a warm bed waiting for us.
N/B: One reason we got lost is because we didn’t have a map. Always take a map with you!!